


Songwriting about a Sunflower

by BabySnoopy



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Gen, ft smol jihoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 20:02:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17310947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabySnoopy/pseuds/BabySnoopy
Summary: a new songwriter is meant to come in this afternoon and Jihoon was ready to show her the rough draft of a song about that one girl with a sunflower hairclip in his childhood; possibly the love of his life then.





	Songwriting about a Sunflower

**Author's Note:**

> writer's block got me opening up a random document of all the fics i started to write and never finished, so here's one from months and months ago!!!!! i love jihoon!!!!!!!!!!!

Jihoon didn’t particularly entertain the idea of working with songwriters he had never met before. This being more of a professional concern than a personal one. He liked the people he’d worked with before because they knew him. They understood his flow, what ungodly hours of the night worked best for him, which flavoured fried chicken ignited inspiration, and the direction of emotion he wanted to channel. Sometimes, it was more of an intimate process than people made it out to be. To Jihoon, writing a song was the straight equivalent of walking into a national broadcast  _naked_. Though the songs he’s written appear to be generic, inviting listeners and fans to project their own stories and meanings onto them, the lyrics have always stemmed from some sort of personal experience of his. Be it an interaction he witnessed on the subway, an iconic line from a movie that moved him, or his own array of complicated emotions.

Recently, Jihoon has been feeling strangely nostalgic. Maybe it was because Seungkwan had just returned from Jeju and kept recounting the joys of visiting the playgrounds and restaurants he loved in his childhood. Or, more likely, it might have been the message his mother had sent him a couple days ago, of a picture she found when she cleaned the dusty boxes from under his old study desk that were left untouched for years. The picture was one that transported him back in time immediately to when he was five years old. He was squatting in a sand pit wearing a navy blue bucket hat. One hand held a small bucket and the other held a shovel with a generous amount of sand piled onto it. Latched onto his back was a girl. Her arms shamelessly hung around his neck and he remembered exactly how afraid he was of his mom, who took the photo, possibly overhearing how loud his heart was pounding. She wore a hair clip with a sunflower on it that kept her bangs in place but the ends of her silky hair, he remembered, tickled his neck.

Crushes weren’t things that Jihoon had a lot of, the most scandalous one being that older girl from middle school. He probably should have had more crushes back then, now that work leaves him with little to no time for such playful endeavours. The girl in the sunflower clip must have been his first crush ever, recalling how her laugh always made him laugh and how the toys she played with were toys he wanted to play with too.

It was a lighthearted memory, nothing bittersweet; though maybe just a swipe of wistfulness. It was four in the morning when he jotted down a stanza or two onto the nearest flat surface he could find; the Chinese takeout carton as a result of his midnight craving.  _This_ was the flow that worked for him. When the sun crept into the room, he’d written the chorus and was ready to wrap up and sneak in a couple hours of sleep. It was then that he saw the message.

_New songwriter coming in later. Make her feel welcome, don’t be nervous._

Nervous? As if. This newbie wasn’t going to disrupt his workflow, not when he’s just sat through a good groove of a nostalgic, romantic song. He repeated this to himself until he finally drifted off, falling asleep in the studio again.

He couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was, but she reminded him of something vaguely familiar. Her grin, when he opened the door for her, was much too wide at 4 p.m. and her eagerness overflowed the tiny studio so much he thought he was getting claustrophobic. But he didn’t. Instead, he caught himself watching the creases forming in the corner of her eyes when he played the couple stanzas he’d written earlier this morning. He watched the way her eyelashes fluttered as she nodded her head to the recording of just his voice, following a beat he was yet to create.

“Awfully romantic, isn’t it?” She began, turning to him. She wondered if he would recognise her now, sitting so closely to each other. His nervous chuckle was something she recognised immediately, like time did not possibly have the heart to alter it to sound different from the time they were kids. “It sounds… comforting? Like going back in time?”

His eyes lit up at that comment, clearly moved by the way she was able to immediately capture the feel in such a short time. “Yeah, exactly!”

“That part before the chorus, I was thinking you could—” She took out a small pencil case from her bag, the keychain hitting loudly against the table, making Jihoon’s eyes go wide immediately. A glittery sunflower stared back at him and it took moments before he could shakily jump to the conclusion that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand. She kept speaking, scribbling lines and encircling words on the sheet of paper he rewrote the lyrics on but he was utterly distracted.

“Wait,” he cut her off, his words getting caught up in his throat like they were clogged. “Are you…” He blinked, looking at the keychain and then back at her. “Do you happen…” He took in her features, reimagining her face with longer hair than the shoulder-cut she came in with. Then she laughed, a sound that ruined wind chimes, a sound that made the corners of his mouth involuntarily curl as well.

“Took you long enough, Jihoon!”

He was in a daze, uncertain if he was perhaps hallucinating after thinking about that photo and writing that song too much. There was no way these things happened in real life, not unless his entire being was a scripted romance film, where eventually he and this girl were ‘meant to be’, brought back together by fate. 

Now he was  _definitely_ nervous, his heart beating rapidly in a way that he was afraid  _she_ would hear. He almost wishes they were kids again so he could just laugh shyly to brush it off, because full-grown adults can’t do that and get away with it. All her attention was on him until he gets up from his seat, pacing the two to three steps that the cramped studio allowed him.

“You… Sunflower clip, right?”

“I can’t believe you’ve forgotten my name.”

No he didn’t. He really didn’t and playing dumb was the only route he could take as of the moment when he couldn’t speak longer coherent sentences. This must have been the catch for being able to write eloquent song lyrics; only being able to choke out words when confronted by the love of his life from his childhood. He really hoped she wasn’t perceptive enough to put two and two together to figure out the recording she just listened to was about  _her_. They hadn’t seen each other in years and he wouldn’t want her thinking he was a creep for writing about her, when clearly the girl that sat in front of him now is not the same as the girl that shared her crayons in class then.

“It’s been a while, yeah?” Finally! A short but nevertheless, proper, sentence. “It’s crazy that we’d meet again like this.”

She brushed her hair behind her ear and all of a sudden it was like he was taken back to the sandbox. Kids were kids and although he wasn’t able to remember what their playdates were like, what her favourite colour was or what movies made her laugh, he was suddenly smacked with a full-fledged bridge for the song, grabbing the pen out of her hand and scribbling the words onto the paper.

The rest of the song told a story of reviving an innocent love, the joy and jitters of getting a second chance to get to know her. This time around, he’d ask all about her, even if he could only do so in fragmented sentences. She looked over his shoulder as he wrote furiously, carefully absorbing the process and watching him cautiously. It was hard to suppress the smile threatening to spread across her face when she caught the word ‘sunflower clip’ in one of the lines. Was it crazy that she wanted to throw her arms around his neck like in that one photo they took a long time back?


End file.
